Architects and Artisans

After decades of urban and suburban infrastructure designed by traffic engineers who’ve delivered tangled and ever-slowing meaning to the word oxymoron, Audi is turning to the architecture community for new solutions. Earlier this week in Munich, the German automobile manufacturer unveiled initial ideas from six international architecture firms in a competition designed to analyze the future of [...]

Manhattan-based Urban Green Council, the NY chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council, takes sustainability for existing buildings seriously. With more than a million structures in New York, 26,000 of them at 50,000 square feet or more, the group has initiated an Oscar-like award competition called the Ebies, as in Existing Buildings. And in a remarkably [...]

It’s back, and perhaps it’s better than ever. Richard Meier & Partners Architects and Stradaproject have announced the re-launching of the Richard Meier furniture collection, first introduced by Knoll International in the 1980s. “It’s an extension of the Knoll collection, but it’s been somewhat modified and changed,” Meier says.  “It’s much more beautifully done.” A [...]

Rebecca Norton and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe work in symmetry as a team known as Awkward x 2, painting together to produce images that belong to neither. They paint at exactly the same time, sometimes for as long as 10 hours at a stretch, like two musicians side by side. They use an affine grid – a favorite [...]

A well-designed building, believes Architzer co-founder and HWKN partner Marc Kushner, is an incredibly effective communications tool, uniquely equipped to bring value to a brand. “It’s a big billboard in the marketplace,” the 2004 graduate of the Harvard Design School says.  “It speaks to users – for those who pass it, it enters into their [...]

On a visit to the Great Pyramid at Gaza back in the early 1970s, author Ken Kesey noted that if one steps right up to it and look upward to the plane, the edifice will fill the entire field of vision. Brazilian photographer Bruno Cals has achieved something similar with his images now on display at [...]

If Enrico Guazzi at LEA Cermaiche’s U.S. offices is correct, we’ll be seeing more and more porcelain tile that looks like wood, slate and travertine in residential applications in the coming year. His commercial clients are asking for geometric, linear and clean patterns for their hotels, restaurants and retail outlets.  They want big slabs, in [...]

For 50 years, modernist Grete Prytz Kittelsen plied her craft as an artist alongside names like Mies, Wright and Eames, but her work these days is only recognized by connoisseurs. Karianne Bjellas Giljie is out to change all that. Her new book on Kittelsen’s work, based on 100 interviews in the ten years before her death in 2010, [...]

A jury of Louisville and Lexington architects has made public its six picks for the 2012 Triangle AIA Residential Tour, to be held on October 6. Jury chair Roberto De Leon headed south to Raleigh in late March to explore in person a number of homes entered for inclusion the tour – and to give [...]

When Andrew Jackson Downing began to publish The Horticulturist magazine in 1846, he not only created a 50-page journal to cover house and garden design, but also a matrix for those interested in the design of parks, cemeteries, schoolhouses, colleges and churches. “It was an exchange of information,” says Caren Yglesias, AIA, author of a new [...]